The 48-day Department of Homeland Security shutdown is one step closer to ending after the Senate moved to fund most of the department Thursday morning.
The Senate agreed via voice vote to send a bipartisan deal funding the whole department except for President Donald Trump‘s immigration enforcement and border security efforts to the House for consideration.
The chamber is not expected to vote on the legislation until House lawmakers return to Washington on April 13.
The Senate vote follows GOP leaders endorsing a two-track approach to funding DHS on Wednesday, with President Trump giving lawmakers a hard deadline to end the record-breaking funding lapse.
The Senate bill accomplishes the first phase of the plan by working with Democrats to fund as much of DHS as possible on a bipartisan basis. However, it would zero out funding for ICE and much of the Border Patrol, save for $11 billion in customs funding going to the agency. Additionally, $10 billion teed up for ICE won’t be funded under the measure.
As for ICE and the Border Patrol, Republicans have said they will seek three full years of funding for both of these agencies in a party-line budget reconciliation package that will bypass Democrats’ opposition. Trump says he wants the forthcoming bill on his desk by June 1.
“We are going to work as fast, and as focused, as possible to replenish funding for our Border and ICE Agents, and the Radical Left Democrats won’t be able to stop us,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday.
The Senate bill’s passage on Thursday was a déjà vu moment for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who helped steer the same measure through the upper chamber last week.
But House GOP leadership sharply rejected it, calling the measure’s exclusion of ICE and CBP money a “crap sandwich” and warning about the risks of funding those entities using the budget reconciliation process. The chamber then put forward a rival proposal that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., made clear was “dead on arrival” in the Senate.
Thune said shortly after the vote that he was hopeful the House would move onto the bill quickly, and that the next step would be budget reconciliation. Still, he blamed Senate Democrats, and not Republicans in-fighting at the finish line, for the current position Congress was in.
“I think this whole where we are is just a regrettable place. We have the Democrats who are holding the appropriations process hostage and their anti-law enforcement, open borders, defund the police wing is the ascendant wing,” Thune said. “And there, I think everybody’s afraid of them, and so we’re stuck in a spot that’s just not good for the country, the future of the appropriations process, or, for that matter, the future of the Senate.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., appeared to relent Wednesday after Trump issued a statement outlining an end to the shutdown that appeared to side with Thune’s two-part approach to funding the department.